The book of Father
THE BOOK OF FATHERS
By Miklos Vamos
Quick, name a Hungarian novelist. Take another three points for Peter Esterhazy, who has seven books in English, though he is better known in Europe than in the United States. Koestler was passionately political, as is Kertesz, whose most famous novel is about a teenage boy’s experience in several concentration camps during World War II.
As the novel opens, the Csillags arrive from Bavaria in the village of Kos. Grandpa is a natural storyteller, and Kornel is eager to hear his family tales. The saga of the Csillags has begun.
Every Csillag (the name changes and changes back, but the heritage remains) manages to live long enough to sire a son, though not always long enough to see him. Some of the fathers and sons are successful at business, others are musically talented even without instruction. As the waves of history and warfare wash over Hungary (Vamos points out in an afterword that in the course of the 300 years of his narrative, Hungary never won a war), the Csillags rise and fall.
Vamos is evenhanded with the first 10 Csillags - each gets 35 pages, more or less. Kornel is succeeded by Balint, lonely possessor of a strange musical proficiency. Every Csillag is active and busy, whether sinned against or sinning, but Vamos’s steady progress through the dramas that engulf them renders “The Book of Fathers” contemplative rather than tragic.
There is not so much of Arthur Koestler’s unblinking, let’s say hopeless, realism in the first nine chapters of The Book of Fathers as there is of leisurely pastoralism. Even Chapter 9, where the musical prodigy Nandor makes a career in the shadow of Enrico Caruso, doesn’t darken until the end, after Nandor has spent a lengthy period at a concentration camp that might be Auschwitz.
Balazs Csillag, who has barely survived the Second World War, seems to his son, Vilmos, to be determined to forget the very things that Vilmos most wishes to learn - family history and history itself. The hope that the last father, Henryk, holds for his 3-year-old son, Konrad, is based on his observation of Konrad’s powers of imagination.
“The Book of Fathers” is a serious novel that, while sometimes agonizing or even shocking, is never somber. Miklos Vamos’s literary skills are such that he can sustain the reader’s interest in each doomed generation (doomed by nature, if nothing else). Note to Vamos’s publisher: More, please! You could have the book here.
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